Where We're Headed if the People Don't Wake Up

That Cheney is the real power in the executive branch may be debatable, but his philosophy is the guiding one, and it in turn is guided by a relatively unknown dude, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington. Read the New Yorker piece and then have a stiff drink. What historical parallel does this follow? As I've written before, the path to dictatorship is often through the legal system, by legitimizing what ought to be outrageous and illegal, like torture, secret prison camps, domestic spying, and an untethered executive. Reading this article was like revisiting the Berlin "Topography of Terror" exhibit that sits atop the old Gestapo headquarters. To wit:

Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside.

And what have we gained by allowing this erosion of law and basic humanity?

Yet, almost five years later, this improvised military model, which Addington was instrumental in creating, has achieved very limited results. Not a single terror suspect has been tried before a military commission. Only ten of the more than seven hundred men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo have been formally charged with any wrongdoing.

A nation of 300 million faces a dreadful future. This is a far more desperate situation than Americans realize, because it's secretive, corrosive, and slow enough not to be felt until it all falls into place, and by then it is far too late to turn back. Ask a Berliner about the years from 1932 onward and you may hear a story shockingly similar to our own as it progresses now.

The most chilling bit of this article is this about Addington's beliefs:

In meetings, he argued that officials in charge of the military commissions should be given maximum flexibility to decide whether to include such evidence. “Torture isn’t important to Addington as a scientific matter, good or bad, or whether it works or not,” the Administration lawyer, who is familiar with these debates, said. “It’s more about his philosophy of Presidential power. He thinks that if the President wants torture he should get torture. He always argued for ‘maximum flexibility.’ ”

"Maximum flexibility"--sounds pretty totalitarian to me. Is that what our brave men and women are dying to protect?